Art Direction, Art Coding

I wake up to find that there's been another round of The Gender Art Wars on the blogs. Awesome!

(I mean that. Awesome! This is the strength of the "blogosphere" I think - roundtable discussions, or arguments, about the issues of the day.)

To catch you up to speed:

Trollsmyth started this new round.
Zak, Oddysey, Greg and Joe chimed in as well.

I must address some of Zak's comments.

Zak makes a point a few times that both makes total 100% sense, and no sense at all (focusing on the issue of art direction in general rather than the specific issue of "marketing to x"):

"Tell [artists] to do whatever they want and pray that one day one of them likes whatever it is that women want--it's the only way to get something with ambisexual appeal AND quality "

"For me, I feel they should be considered part of the content. That way nobody 'from marketing' gets to tell the artist what should be in them and the pictures are more likely to come out unique and personal. Telling Ian Miller or Frank Frazetta or Erol Otus or Trampier to draw a convincing heroic female instead of whatever they were gonna draw is a recipe for disaster and wasted talent."

"When imagery is art-directed and focus-grouped, as it is with the covers of magazines and corporate products--it ALWAYS sucks and ALWAYS appeals not just 'to men' or 'to women' but 'to idiots'"

Now Zak's an artist, and his attitude is understandable. I've been smart enough with Zak to stand back and say "Do whatever you want" for the interior Vornheim artwork and foolish enough to make suggestions for what should be on the cover.

But I'm the publisher. And art director (and mailroom clerk and secretary and sales manager and marketing/PR guy...). I'm still in the middle of art madness for the second printing of Weird Fantasy Role-Playing. I can't draw or paint for shit. So I hire artists.

"Here, do what you want!" doesn't work if I'm paying for it. The art budget has exploded to ridiculous enough heights without paying for a bunch of pieces that I absolutely can't use. There isn't an artist alive whose every work I believe in. I'd go so far as to say there isn't an artist alive who has a majority of work I believe in. I pick artists (and pay them!) based on my confidence in their being able to bend their talent to my vision, not how awesome it would be to give them an opportunity to expand their portfolio how they see fit.

Is it rude to say that? But it's the truth. The artists are there to enhance the writing, not the other way around.

... and I want a product that's going to blow people away and place for industry awards (go for the gold or stay home!). I have specific ideas for many of the pieces. I know what I want, and even pieces where I don't know exactly what I want I know what the overall game needs to look like, so I'm directing the shit out of this artwork. Even to the point of doing my own sketches and telling artists "Do this, without the sucking." Taking photos and saying "put these people in x setting."

Combine that level of interference and direction with the fact that a couple of the artists I know for a fact are not enjoying some of the pieces they work on and you may think there's a problem. I'm an asshole with some of the detail I am asking for. I can see how Zak is exactly right in saying I should leave these people alone to get a better final result.

But... I don't enjoy many of the more tedious aspects of putting together a project and being a publisher either. If you take shortcuts and don't plow through the unpleasant bits with due care, it shows in the end. I'll go so far to say that it's blindingly obvious to anyone looking afterward when someone has ducked the unpleasant bits during the process. Cut corners look like cut corners and no matter what justifications we give for cutting those corners, they show. Customers may be gracious enough to forgive them, but they notice. They shouldn't have to forgive a damn thing.

At this pro-am level, "I don't wanna" just doesn't cut it. Not for me, not for the people working on the project.

There's this goal, this promised land of perfection, and it's on top of the mountain. It doesn't matter how fucking awful it is to get there. Nothing else matters. Just get there! And once you're there, everything you had to do to get there is worth it.

Yeah, just about everyone involved is underpaid for such a project, but everyone else gets paid before I do, if I ever get paid at all. At least I have the moral middle ground of knowing that I'm not taking advantage of the talent while raking in the bucks - they're getting what they asked for. And in exchange, I'm damn well going to get what I ask for.

... but Zak knows all this, and I bet he's smiling with the satisfaction that he doesn't have to put up with any of this shit to make a living from art. :)

And if anyone has any advice of how to commission art to where I get what I want and the artists have all the freedom they want at the same time, I'm all ears. Please.

As to the greater point of "coding" a game's artwork to appeal to a particular group of people:

*shrug*

Forget appeal - I'm making a lot of art choices designed to repulse... which, lucky for me, has an appeal all its own. I may be a bit odd, or I may not be. But I'm not entirely alone in my tastes.

The message in the art is not "Look who you get to be, all these strong images for you to identify with! Isn't that awesome!" It's "You're in for some shit now, you poor dumb dead bastard*!"

The LotFP box cover (that banner art up top of this very blog!), by the way, is not any sort of "gender coding." The elements:

• I wanted people that I know to be in the art.
  
• A human-animal hybrid would be pretty gross and repulsive, right?
• Redheads rock.
• The human should be clothed to reflect the not-as-medieval assumed setting of the game.

That some freak would think of the snake demon as "sexualized" or look at the Flame Princess as an "empowering character" didn't concern me when inventing the piece - although I knew it was coming. The four points combined with my need for things to make sense in context is what drove the cover. A monster living in the north woods wouldn't be wearing clothes or have weapons (and TITS on the COVER has a message of its own - "not compromising to chase shelf space"); a woman traveling through the same would be appropriately clothed and equipped (a hat and pack were originally envisioned laying in the snow - the hat had to have been blown off because I wasn't going to obscure that hair - but they were deemed to clutter the piece... so they are off to the right just beyond the border of the pic), it makes sense and I know the story behind the pic.

Why women in the first place? Well the Flame Princess can't be a man, she can't be the monster, and the monster was originally intended to reprise the first Creature Generator cover with the same person as the monster.

The LotFP artwork is coded to appeal to me. Just me. If my maleness, my whiteness, my American-in-Finlandness, my wears-fluffy-green-Cthulhu-slippersness, my listens-to-metalness, my loves-Italian-foodness, my needs-glassesness, my grumpiness**, or any other thing about me strongly influences the artwork that appears in my work, then I proudly fly all those flags. If I have to choose between what pleases me and what pleases the market, the market loses. And I will live with the consequences of that just fine.

PS. Maria wants to say, "A bunch of gamer men talking how to market to women is futile. The first mistake that is made is to clump all women into some unified group, which they are not. Purely gender does not make anybody like or dislike something. You are looking at a more diverse group than just mere sexual orientation."

PPS. Maria on The Depiction of Women in Gaming article: "She can not extend her comments beyond herself."

But what the hell does Maria know? She's the sort of woman who would marry me.

* Planet Algol really rocks, doesn't it?
** wife suggested that one